What Russia’s leakage of rewards really says about the Trump administration

07/03/2020 USA


Almost a week has passed since The New York Times published a story titled “Russia secretly offered rewards from Afghan militants for killing US troops,” says Intelligence.
The consequences have been coming ever since. Congressional leaders were briefed by intelligence leaders on Thursday. Later, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer said, “Our Armed Forces would be better served if President Trump spent more time reading his daily briefing and less time planning military parades and defending relics of the Confederacy.”
Last week, this scandal inspired Kayleigh McEnany’s famous line “the president does read”; sparked criticism from all kinds of intelligence professionals about the president’s ignorance; and renewed questions about why he seems so soft on Russia. Trump and McEnany and their media allies have reported the leaks to The Times (which has been matched by many other media, including CNN). So let’s take a closer look at the leaks. What can we discern?

Here’s a possibility: The internal governance system for whistleblowers is so broken that concerned officials went to The Times to report it.

Times National Security Correspondent and CNN contributor David Sanger says it is a valid theory.

“If there was a whistleblower / inspector general system that intelligence and Pentagon officials trusted, this story might well not have leaked,” Sanger told me. “But because President Trump has dismantled or politicized much of that system, those who want to make it clear that the president has ignored intelligence may have felt they had no choice but to go to the press.”

Sanger said the president’s determination to eliminate the “deep state,” fueled in part by daily pro-Trump media attacks on the bureaucracy, he might add, has potentially accelerated the leak that is taking place.

Many government officials would argue that the leaks are detrimental to national security. Many reporters, including myself, would argue that the leaks are net positives, because the bounty story has so many more legs this way.

Three key points

I want to mark three points from Sanger and Eric Schmitt’s follow-up story for The Times:
  • “The nature of intelligence, always incomplete and not always final, gives Mr. Trump an opportunity to rule out anything that challenges his worldview.”
  • “It does not require top-secret authorization and access to the government’s most classified information to see that the list of Russian attacks in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War.”
  • “Even Russian state television now regularly mocks Trump like a jester, very different from his giddy tone during the 2016 presidential election.”

“The true deception of Russia”

Peter Bergen comes out with a new column for CNN Opinion. He writes: “Trump called the richly reported stories that the Russians paid the rewards of Afghan militants for killing Afghanistan-based American soldiers as a ‘hoax’. But the real hoax is how White House officials are covering up the Trump’s incompetence as commander in chief … “

The PDB problem

A few days ago, AdWeek journalist Scott Nover observed that “it all goes back to the ‘Trump reads nothing’ story that we established early in Season 1.” Despite White House denials, he has a point.

“I didn’t see, in 17 months, any evidence that the president read the PDB himself,” John Bolton told Jake Tapper on CNN Thursday afternoon, referring to the president’s Daily Brief. So Trump should have been told verbally about the information, even if there was uncertainty. Yes, but can anyone defend the president’s choice not to read the CIA’s daily assessment?

In the Tapper interview, Bolton also said that he had received Trump’s ire for the information related to Russia.

“I think I have enough scars to mention things about Russia that I probably didn’t want to hear, and I can say that I agree with” other accounts of that dynamic, “Bolton said.

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